Santana’s Bad Night

This one from the Department of Slim Consolation: The Mets’ Johan Santana’s ten runs in three and two-thirds innings of work last night against the Phillies was not, strictly speaking, the worst pitching performance of the young season. The Diamondbacks’ Edwin Jackson has given up eight earned runs and the Angels’ Joel Pineiro has given up nine, but they did so while retiring even fewer batters. And Pineiro, it should be noted, was coveted by the Mets, whose hesitation now appears well-founded.

But how to explain this outing by Santana, perhaps the National League’s best left-hander? There is a precedent: nine runs in three-plus innings last June against the Yankees. Taken together, these two out-of-character performances speak to a condition that afflicts every pitcher, even one of Santana’s accomplishment. One explanation comes from Bob Friend, a fine pitcher for the Pirates in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Friend told me that he divided his thirty or so starts every season into three categories: the games when he could make the ball do just what he wanted, those in which he had to muddle through because his command was wanting, and the games when he had nothing. No break to his curve, no pop to his fastball.

Why this happened, he didn’t know. It just did.

Maybe a better explanation comes from the other side of the competitive divide—from a batter, in this instance, the Dodgers’ Duke Snider, whom Friend pitched against. I ran into Snider in Florida just after the 2000 World Series, which had ended with the Mets’ Mike Piazza driving a pitch from the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera to deep center field, where Bernie Williams was waiting to catch it. By how much, I asked the Duke, a notorious self-critic, had Piazza missed tying the game—how far off the sweet spot had he hit the pitch?

Snider held his fingers perhaps a quarter of inch apart.

“A good at-bat,” he said.

Last night, Santana was a strike away from getting out of his disastrous fourth inning, when he missed with a fastball on an oh-and-two count, and Raúl Ibáñez singled. Nor could he throw a strike when he badly needed one, walking in a run when facing, of all of people, the Phillies’ ancient pitcher, Jamie Moyer.

Santana wasn’t off by much—a few inches here and there. Still, he missed by more than Piazza had that night in 2000, and by more than Philadelphia’s Ryan Howard did earlier in last night’s game, when he missed hitting an opposite-field home run by what Joe Morgan, sitting in the broadcast booth, guessed was a sixteenth of an inch.

Count on the old hitters to provide a precise measurement of the line between success and failure.